Expereince a memory, Build a memory of that experience, Experience that memory, Build a memory of that experience...

The thing that scares me the most about human memory becoming a commodity is that I can actually foresee this happening. I don’t know why I’ve found many of our previous topics to be quite far-fetched from actual reality, but this one seems plausible. It could be because I see this transfer of memory similar to that of computers. Let’s say I am at home and create something on Photoshop with all the layers intact. My computer has that experience of creating that piece of work, and then when I carry it on my little flash drive, I can upload it onto some other computer at school. It is then that the second computer seems to mock or have the same experience. This may be a stretch to some extent, but is something that we are doing today – NOW.

This idea brings me to something that Katie said about defining “memory”. She talked about how memory is a recollection of the past, which I gather to be very different than actually “experiencing” something. I guess this is what I got so hung up on in class. I am guessing that I was originally interpreting “memory” as real “experience”. Katie touched on the idea that you can have more than one memory of an experience, which makes perfect sense.

Then this brings me to a looping idea of experiencing a memory and building a memory of that experience.

Let’s say that in our commoditized world of memory, I download a memory. It would seem that as I “experience” it, I would develop my own memory. It’s kind of crazy to think about. Or what if we could bypass this interception and that when we download a memory, it is as if that memory was always a part of our memory. It seems that my thoughts are revolving in a continuously looping contraction.

Something else Katie mentioned was the relation of time to memory. Let’s take the memory of a first kiss. The day after, the feelings or memory of the experience were intense, but as time goes on, we remember that the experience was hopefully great, but don’t really have a memory of the feelings. So then if we were to download a memory, which memory would we download? The memory of the day after? The memory of years later? Or the actual experience?

It would seem that if we commoditized memory, we would be no less human but more or less the same. We would still be humans in that our memory is based on actual human experiences, even though they may not be our own. I do also think to some extent Chris’s idea about the complete annihilation of the human race. I wonder who would be in charge of determining which memories are traded, but knowing how our world works, there will always be hackers or the “black market”. Would this be government regulated? Imagine if the government unleashed a memory that made us all hate one country. The effects could be devastating. I guess what I’m hinting at is that this memory swapping could one day turn into mind control and then would we still be humans?